Brief Summary
Physician Managed Care, a new comprehensive health care reform
plan, connects health care, energy, and the economy with an integrative win,
win, win policy. It also promotes economic justice, job creation, environmental
quality, government food policy reform, fairness for immigrants, and federal
deficit reduction. It promises to shift up to $10 trillion over 10 years in
medical system waste to valuable health services for patients. Patient care
would be administered through competing private, non-profit “accountable care
organizations” (ACOs), with patient health risk-adjusted global budgets.
Patients would choose their ACOs and change if they are unsatisfied. Primary
care physicians (PCPs) would provide medical homes and coordinate all care offering
enhanced services.
Physician Managed Care would merge federal social safety net
funding ($410 billion in 2011), and workers’ compensation indemnity payments
($10 billion) with personal health services funding ($2,500 billion) and
allocate all through the ACOs, providing health AND social safety net services.
Payment reform aspects of Physician Managed Care include (1)
ending employer based medical insurance, (2) eliminating state and local
municipality responsibility for health care of indigent people, (3) requiring
patient premiums ($200 per month per adult and $50 per month per child) with
in-kind subsidies (e.g., healthy food and shelter) available for low income
people, and (4) assessing a health fee on fossil fuel and nuclear energy use
approximately equal to $1.24 per gallon of gas.
Insurance companies would be retained but would not determine which people to insure or what is and is not covered by insurance.
Evidence-based health care with
top-down guidelines and politician mandated benefit packages would be replaced
by evidence-based medicine as practiced by the individual health care providers
in ACOs who make all insurance funding decisions.
Our dysfunctional food system
would be reformed in two ways. ACOs rather than the US Department of
Agriculture would allocate federal social safety net food assistance funds ($65
billion in 2011). The health fee on non-renewable energy would incentivize local
production of plant based foods over fossil fuel intensive agribusiness methods
that produce mostly animal products.
Tens of millions of jobs would be created by funding
currently unpaid caregivers of children, the elderly, and disabled; paying for
preventive medicine healers, and providing paid public service work
opportunities.
Physician Managed Care is a uniquely American, integrated, multi-system reform plan for the 21st century.